On modern wealth’s bland aesthetics, the reopening of the Frick, and the meaning behind our Gilded Age nostalgia.
Cultural Currency is a bi-monthly romp through the intersection of art and capital with writer Cara Marsh Sheffler.
In his recent New York Times article, “Beige is the Color of Money,” Guy Trebay explored the prevalence of muted palettes in the homes and playgrounds of the rich around the world, from St. Moritz to the Sun Valley. “In past eras,” Trebay writes, “the wealthy tended to attire themselves in the richest of colors: indigo, crimson, the purple of nobilities and kings. We are no longer in that era. These days, the hue preferred by the richest people on earth is that most bland and mousy of non-colors — beige.” Trebay argues this shift has come to the fore during a populist moment, as the “rich hunker down in khaki camouflage.” He posits that being clad in “the anodyne colors of baby food, tea cookies or screensavers: latte, oatmeal, cream, butterscotch, café au lait” signals the notion of wealth in reserve, not something to be flaunted before the frothing fury of the masses. Trebay quotes Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna, as saying, “The ultrawealthy don’t want to show off, and beige colors are good in that sense…This class of people is super discreet and doesn’t want to be seen.”
This is bullshit. Rather, I would argue, beige is a marker of how they want to be seen. And unsurprisingly, compared to its colorful predecessors, it’s a hell of a lot less interesting to look at. Aspirational wealth, now the color of barf, is especially barfy. Intriguingly, it also seems to have sparked a bit of unexpected nostalgia for when the rich spent their money on batshit, exhilarating displays of filthy lucre, rather than on a $30,000 Loro Piana cardigan that makes both the wool it is made of and the person wearing it look like a virgin.
After a five-year renovation, a temple of that sort of old-school, jewel-toned ostentation has reopened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the base of the Museum Mile: The Frick Collection. Ever since it reopened to the public on April 17, the museum has been so booked solid that the only way to get in on a given day is to cough up $90 for a membership. The line snaking around the block indicates this is no deterrent whatsoever. Boasting a hundred-foot-long gallery covered in the most sensual green velvet wallpaper the nation of France could produce, illuminated by a skylight that runs the entire length of the room, the Frick is the pinnacle of everything modern wealth is not. I confess I could lose an afternoon staring at its emerald walls alone, never mind the Corots, Turners, Goyas, and El Grecos that line them.
The Frick is a civilized place: There are no cameras or children allowed. Renovation aside, it is also a museum deliberately out of pace with the modern world. True to its namesake, Henry Clay Frick was a top-tier robber baron: coal and coke magnate, business partner to Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, union-buster extraordinaire. His taste reflects it. If money could buy it in 1906, his mansion on the prime corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue probably has it. A gargantuan Rembrandt self-portrait? Check! An entryway made of ten tons of Breccia Aurora Blue marble leading to an indoor fountain? Check! An Aeolian pipe organ? Check! Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More? Check! A Fragonard room and a Boucher room? Check, check! (Randy Baroque artists always travel best in pairs.)
Despite occupying such a rarefied niche, both tourists and locals continue to flock to the Frick in droves, celebrating the extraordinarily beautiful shit one rich person managed to buy and keep in his freakishly expensive piece of real estate. However, in our oligarch-besotted cultural moment, it does make me wonder why this is the kind of blue-blooded wealth we red-blooded Americans seem to be so nostalgic for.
For starters, the blood in America isn’t truly blue. For all one might say about Old New York Society—from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom to Edith Wharton—we can all agree old money isn’t so old on our side of the pond. No; the Frick, then, isn’t a temple of old wealth, but a bastion of what American rich used to be perceived as. Think of Scrooge McDuck back-stroking through his ducats; Daddy Warbucks tap-dancing; Mr. Potter scowling in his boardroom; Prince Akeem before his Randy Watson Brooklyn drag; or, most simply, Donald Trump himself, who, as Fran Lebowitz put it, “is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.”
One need not do a deep read of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to know that ever since a raggedy pack of religious extremists dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock in 1620, this country’s inhabitants have had some fucked up ideas about wealth. Notably, New England’s Calvinist pilgrims subscribed to the doctrine of predestination: they believed God knew from the jump whether you were going to heaven or to hell—free will and the quaint American myth of bootstraps be damned. The Pilgrims also believed that God showed favor by showering wealth and good fortune upon His “elect,” and that God’s elect demonstrated their status through a lifetime of righteousness and upstanding behavior. This has quite certainly set a tone that persists well into 2025: Americans are desperate people who have deluded themselves into thinking they can become respectable. And that, to us, means rich.
To this day, American “blue-bloods” claim descent from Mayflower stock, as did Henry Clay Frick. This tenuous—one might even say aspirational—connection is reflected in his art collection, and his proclivity for the Dutch masters, who painted the Calvinist aristocracy. The Mayflower itself was funded by Dutch Calvinists, the upper class of what was then the richest country in the world. Like the uber wealthy of today, the Calvinist elite showed their wealth in what they thought were subtle ways. They also did not not want to be seen. Rather, they wanted to be perceived as favored by God but in control of themselves—and, undoubtedly, of others (all that Bible study did little to put them off the slave trade). Like the Beige Hordes on the slopes of Courchevel today, they also preferred monotone—albeit darker hues. Simultaneously, they wore the richest fabrics, lace, and stonking pearls, all studiously catalogued in paintings eventually collected by the likes of Henry Clay Frick. Although scholarship speaks to the “restraint” in this era of fashion, I doubt a starving man in 17th-century Amsterdam would have perceived much holding back in the sumptuous, candlelit banquet tables groaning with all manner of fish, fowl, fruit, flower, crystal, and silver depicted in countless Dutch still lifes—and now hung on the Frick’s emerald green walls. Four hundred years later, I wonder if those glorious spreads were allowed to rot or wilt in the studio.
Curiously, given the beige miasma, much ink has also been spilled about the “New Gilded Age,” and how big, loud 80s bling is back—supply-side shoulder pads and caviar. At first blush, this may seem like a contradiction, but one must remember it’s a nerd version of such bling of yore, a taste memorably summed up in Rebecca Shaw’s Guardian headline, “I Knew One Day I’d Have to Watch Powerful Men Burn the World Down, I Just Didn’t Expect Them to Be Such Losers.” Yes, Zuck got his MAGA makeover and is sporting chains and Balenciaga—so much for the de rigueur Prius and Uniqlo hoodie from HBO’s Silicon Valley. But Zuck’s Maui Ewok-chic hideaway has nothing on Henry Clay Frick’s Fifth Avenue digs, and offers nothing new to wealth’s aesthetics but cheap imitation. Henry Clay Frick brought Old World Wealth over to the New to demonstrate his own preeminence. Grandeur and history were entirely the point. For Zuck and his billionaire brethren, there largely isn’t one.
In an interview with comedian Dan Rosen for his Middlebrow podcast, “cyberethnographer” Ruby Thelot discussed why he believes the tech elite don’t collect art: “A lot of my friends in tech in SF, besides maybe video games, are not interested in being an audience to culture that is not about them…When I am in front of the painting over there…I need to accept that I am not the center of the activity. I need to understand something else, right? I’m not optimizing myself. When you run you can beat your time. Either I like the painting or I don’t like the painting. There isn’t a clear metric around it.” Of course, Henry Clay Frick is at the center of his art, as long as his museum-mansion bears his name: he bought it and, because of his immense wealth, we get to see it all in one place. (Tellingly, his favorite painting he bought was said to be Goya’s “The Forge” which depicted the metalworking that made him a rich man.) But the Beige Bros lack the ability to see it this way, or with any nuance. Similarly, this framework also explains why the splashiest art commission Zuck has made was a seven-foot sculpture of his wife, a monstrosity brought into this world by Daniel Arsham, famed for luxury brand collaborations and toy cars.
In the same interview, Thelot talks about how the culture is poorer when an audience for the arts is not cultivated from a young age and the world is run by engineers who live to work and order food to their desks on DoorDash. He implies that the striving goals of such a class of workers are simply optimization of the mind, the body, and, of course, the bank account. He sees it as a “tragedy” that they cannot tell a Monet apart from a Manet. He pins the blame on the death of liberal arts education and core curriculums.
Whatever the cause, today’s drip simply isn’t the same. The Old Masters art market has crashed. Dead is the notion of owning old, expensive booty from empires of yore that require knowledge of craft and scholarship to appreciate. The Frick is a jaw-dropping floorshow of exactly that, and a testament to its staying power when compared to the bling of today. After all, what would a Tech Bro museum look like? Would it have its own crypto currency? Would it boast a ketamine-fueled gala on the playa at Burning Man? Or would it simply be a subtly textured, puckered ecru circle of hell underneath Satan’s frozen asshole in the Divine Comedy? (Full disclosure, that is exactly how I imagine the playa at Burning Man.)
Anyone with a smartphone is treated to breathless news coverage of the rich: lavish events and vacations and jewels. But before rockets and megayachts (and make no mistake, Henry Clay Frick owned a steamship and the 19th-century equivalent of a rocket: a private rail car), the rich collected the booty handed down (read: stolen) from one empire to the newly ascendant one. They valued provenance, because they believed it placed them squarely in its lineage. It became their own heritage, like the family trees we Americans are so short on. To own a Roman mosaic or bust was to embody a bit of Caesar. This narrative of empire is today the backbone of most major museums, a correlation that is a pet topic of mine. It is also exactly why the Frick feels so familiar and so august: it’s like a mini museum in which one God-fearing, union-busting man lived, an experience we can microdose ourselves by walking through it.
Of course, the art of the rich still crowds the walls of museums. Just as surely, that art reflects the power of certain dealers, just as it always has. Joseph Duveen, who famously said, “Europe had a great deal of art, and America had a great deal of money,” was the famed dealer to the robber barons in the Gilded Age. He maintained four separate accounts for Henry Clay Frick alone. In New York City right now, four major museum retrospectives feature contemporary artists represented by a single blue-chip gallery, Hauser and Wirth. The rich and their servants still do a great deal to shape our notions of culture and refinement. But that 19th-century robber baron wealth is what built US museums and spread the seductive, Calvinist lie that a world where the rich were stewards of nice things was a world where the rich maybe deserved to have those nice things. Sometimes, the rich even shared them with the plebes, usually after they died out of noblesse oblige, or simply hating their kids.
Nostalgia for the Gilded Age is nostalgia for a world order that perhaps kept us down, but at least made a little bit of sense (if you squinted hard enough at the Dutch still life). Today, we have Kaws at every art fair and Katy Perry dismayingly back from space in one piece. TikTok is rife with alleged “home improvements” that destroy historic homes in pursuit of a Kardashian aesthetic that somehow manages to be both spare and maximalist. Rebecca Shaw was right: today’s rich are cringe. Beige, however, is not a matter of seeking inconspicuousness; it is a part of the cultural poverty that plagues our ruling class, whose libraries go no further than A for Ayn Rand. Beige is the color of a desert of ideas, as well as what the earth will look like once the billionaire class has destroyed it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or not one considers the hue ostentatious. Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age,” once wrote, “The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.” After all, it also doesn’t matter what someone is wearing when you’re under their boot. But that won’t stop me from renewing my Frick membership (or—full disclosure—borrowing my mom’s).
